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Official government anti-immigrants banner in Miskolc, Hungary, during elections on 31 March 2018. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.

TheEconomist
recently published an article titled “European xenophobia reflects racial
diversity, not asylum applications.” Despite the misleading title, the
article actually purports to show that the ethnic and racial make-up of a country
is strongly correlated with increases in pro-immigrant sentiment in Europe. It illustrates
this using a scatterplot, where points represent the share of a country’s
population with non-western ancestry in 2014 by the increase in average level
of positive attitudes towards non-EU migrants before and after the so-called
migration crisis. The line through this scatterplot is steep, suggesting a
powerful association with serious real-world implications. Indeed, it implies
that increasingly diverse societies will ultimately mean more tolerance for new
diversity. Depending on your political persuasion, this is either a reason to
celebrate or cause for alarm.

However,
for scholars studying the relationships among diversity, anti-immigrant
sentiment, and voting for the radical right, this article raised serious questions
– most fundamentally whether this finding reflects reality. As discussed in a
recent article for the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, the relationship between diversity and
reactions to diversity, such as voting for a radical right party, is far from straightforward,
making The Economist’s result
somewhat of an outlier in a large body of research.

Measuring overall racial and ethnic
diversity

Almost
immediately, we found reason to be skeptical of the The Economist’s claim. One of the variables – the share of a
country’s population with non-western ancestry in 2014 – does not measure what
the authors hope it measures. To create this variable the The Economist data team made creative use of the European Social Survey (ESS), a biennial
cross-national survey of individuals across Europe. Based on how respondents
answered questions about ancestry, they created measures of diversity for each
country.

However,
this is problematic for a number of reasons. First, countries that participate
in ESS rely on random samples of populations 15 years and
older. The ESS does not allow “quota sampling,” or oversampling of particular
subpopulations to combat non-response or to ensure a specific demographic
profile.

Second,
because surveys are conducted using national languages, recent immigrants make
up a very small proportion of respondents. Across the 8 rounds of the survey, the
average proportion of respondents that are foreign-born is 9.5%. Of that group,
over 50% immigrated over 20 years ago. Third, less than 6% of all ESS
respondents identify as an ethnic minority in their country of residence. The Economist data team itself reported
that experts cautioned against using ESS data to create country-level measures
of racial and ethnic make-up, “due to small sample sizes for ethnic minorities
in each country.”

There
are other data sources available, fortunately. Eurostat, the statistical office of
the European Union (EU), compiles and provides detailed
information about the resident populations of all 28 EU member states and all 4
European Free Trade Association (EFTA) member states. In the table below, we
identify the countries with the largest and smallest shares of foreign-born populations
from countries outside the European Union that score low or medium on the United Nations’ Human Development Index
(HDI).
We also report statistics for the size of the non-EU population irrespective of
country of origin HDI as well as the size of the foreign-born population
regardless of country of origin.

The
differences between The Economist’s
measure of diversity and actual population data are far from negligible. Based
on their calculations, the authors report that less than 1% of Scandinavian
countries have non-western ancestry. This is simply not true, and inconsistent
with The
Economist’s own
reporting on immigration to Sweden and Denmark. Eurostat data shows that
between 2014 and 2016, the non-EU population in Sweden was 11% of the
population. The non-EU population from countries with low or medium HDI was 6%.
In Demark, the averages for 2014 and 2016 are 7% non-EU and 3% non-EU from
countries with low/medium HDI. In Norway, these statistics are 8% and 4%
respectively.

In
the article, the authors claim Scandinavia and Eastern European countries are
similar in regards to diversity. As the table above makes clear, these regions
are actually quite different. Further, the authors note that only 3.7% of
German respondents self-identify as having “non-western” ancestry, however Eurostat
data show that 7% of those residing in Germany were born in countries outside
the EU. This figure does not even include the children of immigrants born in
Germany, which means an estimation of 3.7% non-western ancestry is way off. While
still an imperfect measure of overall racial and ethnic diversity, the Eurostat
statistics on different sub-populations of immigrants provide a more accurate
picture of the kind of diversity The
Economist article attempted to capture.

Statistical insignificance

Nevertheless,
if The Economist captured a real
relationship, we should be able to reproduce it using population data from Eurostat.
In the scatterplots below, we show the relationship between these three
measures of the foreign-born population in 2014 and the percentage of ESS
respondents reporting support for immigration from “poorer countries outside of
Europe” in 2014.

These
are respondents who think their country should allow “many” or “some”
immigrants (versus “a few” or “none”). Regardless of how we measure the size of
the immigrant population, there is a positive correlation, buttressing The Economist’s claim that diversity is
associated with more positive attitudes towards immigrants. However, bivariate
regression analyses reveal that the only statistically
significant relationship is the one between the relative size of the
foreign-born population from non-EU, low/medium HDI countries and
pro-immigration sentiment.

What
if we look at the changes that
occurred in countries between 2014-2016? After all, if diversity has a positive
effect on support for immigration, then those countries that experienced an
increase in diversity should also see an increase in positive attitudes towards
immigration. The scatterplots below tell a different story. In each, there is a
negative relationship between changes in attitudes about immigration and the
change in proportions of immigrants in European countries. However, bivariate
regression analyses show that none of
these relationships is statistically significant.

What
does this mean? First, the link between diversity and attitudes towards
immigration is more nuanced than portrayed in The Economist’sarticle. While
levels of immigration-generated diversity are positively correlated with
pro-immigration attitudes, increases in diversity are correlated with a
decrease in support. Second, and importantly, most of the relationships
depicted here are statistically insignificant.
If we had shown relationships using only 2016 data, however, we could have reported
more significant results – but that only speaks to how tenuous this
relationship is.

Subjective attitudes towards immigration

The
complicated relationship between immigration and attitudes towards immigrants
was the focus of a recent
meta-analysis of 55 peer-reviewed articles. The authors of this meta-analysis,
Yolande Pottie-Sherman and Rima Wilkes, find that the measure of immigration
that most consistently explains attitudes towards immigration is perceived group size. In 70% of the
models tested, subjective group size
has a significant effect on prejudice. Meanwhile, in the vast majority of
models, objective measures of diversity
do not have a statistically significant effect on attitudes. Thus, perceptions
of group size appear to matter more for attitudes about immigrants than actual
group size. And, other research shows that these perceptions are not always
accurate: Europeans tend to overestimate the size
of the immigrant population in their countries. Perceptions
of group size appear to matter more for attitudes about immigrants than actual
group size. And, other research shows that these perceptions are not always
accurate.

Immigration
and subsequent diversity are arguably the most salient political issues across
western democracies. Thus, it is important that strong claims about the impact
of immigrant groups in particular countries or cross-national trends are supported
by data. The way we understand the world has implications for individual
behaviors, intergroup relations, and even policy outcomes.

To
better understand pro- or anti-immigrant attitudes, or any phenomenon for that
matter, we must use data sources and methods that help us describe and explain
reality as accurately as possible. Further, to get a complete picture, we
should never rely on one study, one correlation, or one scatterplot. Nuance may
be less exciting or, in the age of social media, less “clickable,” but it is much
more consistent with the complexities of our social world. Given the political salience
of immigration and how affected we are by our own perceptions of immigration,
it is critical that we get the details right.

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